Sunday, August 26, 2012

It feels appropriate that I bought my copy of Dmitrii
Lipskerov’s 40 лет Чанчжоэ (The Forty Years of Changzhuoe) at my
local Russian grocery store: I didn’t buy chicken that day but the book chronicles
the strange life of a town invaded by a horde of chickens. Still, though the residents
of Changzhuoe—the name apparently means “Chicken City”—find ways to capitalize
on the arrival of millions of birds and many people develop feathers, The Forty Years of Changzhuoe is less about
birds and feathers then about upside-down worlds and, to borrow from one of the
book’s characters, “обыкновенный
атавизм,” which I think I might call “normal atavism” here. It’s a
diagnosis of sorts.

Though The Forty Years
of Changzhuoe chronicles the city’s forty-year history (and, by many
accounts, borrows from Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose Hundred Years of Solitude are but a vague, distant memory for me…),
it’s difficult to pinpoint its temporal setting in our parallel world. The novel
apparently takes place before the Russian revolution, though the passage of
time is often distorted in the town’s history, which is typed in code by a
character named Elena who works in a trance-like state. Her husband, Genrikh Shaller,
an officer who’s not really an officer, brings the text to one Mr. Teplyi (Mr.
Warm, who’s anything but warm), a teacher at the local orphanage, for
deciphering. One of Mr. Teplyi’s students is Jerome, a character who helps
connect several of the book’s threads, largely because he’s a nosy young voyeur.

Lipskerov populates his town with lots more characters,
including Liza and Françoise, who are two of Shaller’s lovers, a physicist
named Gogol, a doctor on the make, and a set of bickering town council members.
There’s also a businessman who decides to build a Babel-like tower of
happiness. For me, what’s most interesting about all these figures is the way
Lipskerov twists myth and literary expectations. [Spoiler alert!] For example,
in Changzhuoe, unlike in Nikolai
Karamzin’s sentimental classic, “Poor Liza,” Liza doesn’t do herself in because
she’s distraught—growing chicken feathers doesn’t push her to suicide—it’s her
beau, the businessman with the tower, who kills himself by diving off the
structure in front of a crowd.

Physical and metaphorical flights are a theme in the book, too,
so a physicist named Gogol feels doubly mischievous, particularly since Nikolai
Gogol’s nose-in-the-bread caper (among others), defies our world’s laws of
physics. And then there’s the cannibalistic Mr. Teplyi, who keeps a gruesome
library and kills because it helps him decode Elena’s text. Teplyi feels like a
twist on Dostoevsky, particularly when he tells Shaller that the presence of a
hatchet doesn’t necessarily indicate a killer.

Reading Olga Slavnikova’s 1997 piece about Changzhuoe in the journal Ural reminded me of numerous other aspects of this
crowded novel that I’d either forgotten or downplayed as I read. I was glad for
her mention of characters’ propensity to forget their pasts and take on new
names, and Slavnikova notes the laic canonization of people whose sins are
forgiven, calling Changzhuoe’s saints folkloric characters. This form of dvoeverie, or dual
belief, fits nicely with the (many!) carnivalistic elements I found in the book.
Slavnikova also points out the erasure of one key character’s character… in
fact, most of the town erases itself, returning the place to the same status (essentially
a hole in the ground) it had at the beginning of the chronicle.

Perhaps the oddest aspect of Changzhuoe is that it’s not nearly as confusing or messy to read as
it is to summarize. Even better, it’s a fairly enjoyable piece of work that
combines eroticism, murder, magical realism, and, of course, atavism (usual or
otherwise) and strange cycles of history. The book and its characters are
certainly quirky, combining old-fashioned and modern, so I give Lipskerov lots
of credit for placing most of his book—a debut novel—on the dark side of quirky
rather than succumbing to cuteness. I can only imagine what some other writers
might have done with all those feathers.

Level for Non-Native
Readers of Russian: around 3/5 out of 5.

Up Next: A quick
post on Ergali Ger’s Koma, then Andrei
Rubanov’s short stories and Marina Stepanova’s Lazarus and all his women.

Sunday, August 19, 2012

After calling the Moscow
Noir short story anthology “a dark book indeed” two years ago, I
think I can sum up St.
Petersburg Noir, a new collection edited by Julia Goumen and
Natalia Smirnova for Akashic’s noir anthology series, as “a pretty dark book.” Put
another way: If Moscow is pitch black,
St. Peterburg is moving toward deep
dusk.

I loved the brutal, elemental scariness of the Moscow book—and
recognize how very skewed my perspective is after living and working near all
too many Moscow crime scenes—but wonder if the slightly lighter St. Petersburg collection,
which is very decent, might find a broader readership.

Bits of St. Petersburg
Noir’s stories blended together in my mind as I read, melding into a composite portrait
of a city loaded with poverty, aimlessness, drugs, back streets, squalid
apartments, ballet, and canals… plus murder and other violent misdeeds set
amidst cultural sites and monuments. Here are a few stories that especially distinguished
themselves for me:

Andrei Rubanov’s “Barely a Drop,” translated by Marian
Schwartz, felt the most classically noir to me, focusing on a writer who takes
the train to St. Petersburg to spy on his wife, whom he suspects of having an
affair. Rubanov is an economical writer who can fit a lot into a short story.

The first story in the book, Andrei Kivinov’s “Training
Day,” translated by Polly Gannon, looks at law enforcement, morgue runs, and
everyday fears (e.g. elevators, one of my own Russia phobias) with an apt combination
of seaminess and humor.

“The Sixth of June,” by Sergei Nosov and translated by
Gannon, stars a first-person narrator who quickly introduces himself as a would-be
assassin with plans to act on Pushkin’s birthday.

I thought Julia Belomlinsky’s “The Phantom of the Opera
Forever,” translated by Ronald Meyer, a revenge tale, was one of the edgiest
stories in the book. It begins with a small chunk of Crime and Punishment and moves on to “All our life here—it’s a
fucking Dostoevsky nightmare!”

Though Pavel Krusanov’s “The Hairy Sutra,” translated by Amy
Pieterse, felt silly and predictable with its museum zoologists, conflicts, and
specimens, it turned out to be one of the most oddly memorable stories in the
book because of its distinct setting, characters, and exhibits.

Still, the scariest and darkest story I’ve read lately is in
the thick journal Новый мир: Alexander Snegirev’s “Внутренний враг” (“The
Internal Enemy”). Snegirev’s story is rooted in sociopolitical and
historical tension: a young man, Misha, gets a call about an inheritance and
then finds out his family history isn’t quite what he thought. Snegirev plays
on Misha’s idealism, identity, and dread of the KGB as he builds a creepy, phantasmagoric
family drama set in a house that feels haunted. The story’s psychological
suspense and intensity surprised me—and sucked me in—after some early passages that felt a bit conventional.

Finally, two novels I don’t plan to finish but that I want to mention because they’re both finalists for the 2012 Big Book Award: The first 140 pages of Vladimir Makanin’s Две сестры и Кандинский (Two Sisters and Kandinsky) also center around societal divides
and the KGB as Makanin examines the consequences of informing. Alas, the novel,
which draws on Chekhovian themes and reads almost like a play, didn’t hold my
interest and I stopped reading after the first act section. I also had
trouble with Sergei Nosov’s Франсуаза, или Путь к леднику (Françoise Or the Way to the Glacier): eavesdropping on a guy who chats with his
herniated disc just isn’t my thing. There’s more to the book than that, of
course, including a Russia-India contrast, leeches, a stolen lung, and smoking
cessation courses, but the whole package felt gimmicky, contrived, and
surprisingly dull. Françoise was also
shortlisted for the 2012 NatsBest.

Disclaimers and Disclosures:The
usual. I received a review copy of St.
Petersburg Noir from Akashic Books, thank you very much! I have met and
chatted with Julia Goumen, one of the book’s editors, on numerous occasions. I
enjoyed meeting Alexander Snegirev, whom I’d known online for a couple years,
at BookExpo America in June… I promised him I’d be honest in my assessment of
“The Internal Enemy.” And, of course, I was!

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

I’m glad Zakhar Prilepin’s list
of favorite books and stories from the noughties reminded me that I had
Dmitry Danilov’s “Чёрный и зелёный” (“Black and
Green”) on my e-reader—Danilov’s novella about the wanderings of a tea salesman
was fun to read, a lovely example of form and content intertwined. I enjoyed
Danilov’s Horizontal Position very
much, too (previous
post), but “Black and Green” somehow felt even better, more homey… I’d like to think it’s all the tea, though I suspect I just feel even more at home now in Danilov’s
world, finding humor and humanness in a place that initially felt bland and
sketched but now feels full and almost cozy in its spareness.

Danilov tells “Black and Green” in a first-person voice that
resembles the narrative voice of Horizontal
Position: the anonymous storyteller of “Black and Green” uses clipped,
stripped language, too, offering minute detail about what he sees in his
travels and work but saying little about his background or the family he needs
to feed. Though the bulk of “Black and Green” describes tea-selling trips to places
outside Moscow, Danilov begins his story by describing a dull night job in an
office, then an attempt to sell books and postcards to bookstores. It’s futile
in the summer. Come back later. Okay.

It’s difficult to convey the strange pleasure of reading
“Black and Green.” In terms of detail, the descriptions of tea and towns are
wonderful, particularly if you are a tea drinker and/or have been to Russia,
but I think this bit, about the narrator’s tea trips with a car owner, Sasha,
gets at the essence of what I love so much about how Danilov writes:

I began riding with Sasha. Of course this was much nicer and
more convenient than taking electrichkas,
and, sure, it’s better to work together, though the latter is not a hard-set
rule because when you go somewhere far away by yourself, you don’t chat, so
there are more chances to fall into a semimeditative stupor and notice things
that are difficult to notice in a normal condition.

In a later section titled “Rage Against the Machine,” the
narrator describes his own experiences driving, concluding that driving wears
on the nerves, which is hardly interesting or poetic, qualities he implies he found
on public transportation. That follows up nicely on the appealing “semimeditative stupor”
in the passage above: Danilov’s use of repetition, short sentences, and
seemingly irrelevant details all fit beautifully with the paradoxical daze that
envelopes his narrators and acts on the reader. He piles on seemingly dull
information but stops short of overload, creating unexpectedly nuanced pictures
of situations and atmospheres. And what the narrator of “Black and Green” doesn’t
say—about his wife, his clients, his aspirations—is at least as important as
what he does say, pushing the reader’s imagination to feel the significance of the
gaps.

“Black and Green” includes everything from advice on brewing
green tea—Maybe I’d like the stuff if I made it properly?— to quietly humorous summaries
of towns. The brief entry for the town of Chekhov, for
example, ends with this: “Чехов – не очень хороший город. Чехов – очень хороший
писатель.” (“Chekhov is not a very good city. Chekhov is a very good writer.”)
The novella also includes a passage about a funeral for a friend who committed
suicide. Danilov captures drabness before the funeral:

“Gray day and gray smoke from a huge gray smokestack.
Perovskaya Street, the heart of the unpleasant Perovo area. Gray five-storey
buildings and dirty-white nine-storey buildings.”

One of Danilov’s best writerly gifts is that he stops when he’s
written enough… just as his narrator in “Black and Green” knows when it’s time
to leave the tea trade for an office job, before he tires of tea and no longer
enjoys his clockwise sweeps through the Moscow region, loaded down with
packages of tea.

Up Next: Dmitrii
Lipskerov’s 40 лет Чанчжоэ(The Forty Years of Chanchzhoeh), an odd piece of work about a town invaded by hens. And short
stories galore, including St. Petersburg
Noir. Then even more stories: Andrei Rubanov’s Стыдные подвиги(Shameful
Feats/Exploits… I’m still not sure…), a collection of short stories that
I’ve been reading at the beach.